The frustrations provoked quarrels between commanders. A majority
General Heinz Guderian was the most outspoken—despaired of
Hitler’s diversions. Moscow was not only the capital of the Soviet
Union, they argued, it was also a major centre for communications
and the armaments industry. An attack on it would also draw in
surviving Soviet armies to their final destruction. The Führer, however,
kept his generals in order by exploiting their rivalries and
disagreements. He told them that they knew nothing of economic
matters. Leningrad and the Baltic had to be secured to protect essential
trade with Sweden, while the agriculture of the Ukraine was vital to
Germany. Yet his instinct to avoid the road to Moscow was partly a
superstitious avoidance of Napoleon’s footsteps.
Army Group Centre, having secured Smolensk and encircled the
Soviet armies beyond it at the end of July, was ordered to halt. Hitler
sent most of Hoth’s panzer group northwards to help the attack on
Leningrad, while ‘Panzerarmee Guderian’ (the new designation was
a typical Hitlerian sop to a disgruntled but necessary general) was
diverted southwards to act as the upper jaw of the great Kiev
encirclement.
Hitler changed his mind again early in September when he at last
agreed to Operation Typhoon, the advance on Moscow. Yet more
time was lost because Hoth’s panzer divisions were still engaged in
the outskirts of Leningrad. The forces for Operation Typhoon were
not finally ready until the very end of September. Moscow lay just
over 200 miles away from where Army Group Centre had been halted,
and little time remained before the period of autumn mud, and then
winter. When General Friedrich Paulus, Haider’s chief planner for
Barbarossa, had raised the question of winter warfare earlier, Hitler
had forbidden any mention of the subject.
--STALINGRAD, Antony Beevor